The European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, said today it’s ditching Microsoft Corp.’s software programs in favor of open-source alternatives after the software giant revoked its academic status, forcing it to pay more for its products.

CERN previously could use Microsoft’s software products such as Windows at a heavily discounted rate for decades thanks to its status as an academic institution. But the research organization said Microsoft’s decision to revoke that status has forced it to look elsewhere, as it reckons it simply cannot afford its standard license fees any more.

“CERN has enjoyed special conditions for the use of Microsoft products for the last 20 years,” Emanuel Ormancey, deputy group leader at CERN, wrote in a blog post. “However, recently, the company has decided to revoke CERN’s academic status, a measure that took effect at the end of the previous contract in March 2019, replaced by a new contract based on user numbers, increasing the license costs by more than a factor of ten. Although CERN has negotiated a ramp-up profile over ten years to give the necessary time to adapt, such costs are not sustainable.”

CERN didn’t say why Microsoft had decided to revoke its academic status, but in any case it’s clearly not happy about the extra costs. So the organization has launched what it calls the Microsoft Alternatives project, or MAlt, in order to reduce its reliance on the Redmond firm’s software.

At @CERN, we are moving away from @Microsoft products due to their license fee increases for our research laboratory.

We will try to use Open Source software as much as possible :)https://t.co/s1LqxDuRmJ

/cc @phoronix

— Iban Eguia (@Razican) June 12, 2019

CERN already uses open-source software to power its most famous research projects, such as its Large Hadron Collider, but for more mundane tasks such as running its desktops, Windows has always been its favored choice. The goal of the MAlt project is to “investigate the migration from commercial software products to open-source solutions, so as to minimize CERN’s exposure to the risks of unsustainable commercial conditions,” CERN said.

Ormancey reckons that CERN isn’t the only organization that’s suffering from Microsoft’s insistence on per-user licensing but said it’s one of the first to do something about it.

For example, CERN is set to deploy a pilot email service based on open-source software for its information technology department in the summer. That will be followed by an organizationwide migration. In addition, it’s planning to ditch Microsoft’s Skype software for a “softphone telephony pilot.”

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said Microsoft would do well to keep an eye on CERN’s migration from its products, as its efforts could find imitators given its brand and reputation.

“On the other hand, it may just be shrewd negotiation tactics from CERN,” Mueller said. “It would not have been the first time an enterprise announced plans to migrate off a platform before contract negotiations are up.”

CERN is in any case in a good position to drop Microsoft’s products since it already has quite a bit of expertise with Linux and other open-source systems. For example, many of its systems are hosted on OpenStack-based clouds. It also created its own Linux distribution, called Scientific Linux, though this is being discontinued in favor of CentOS.

“While the Microsoft Alternatives project is ambitious, it’s also a unique opportunity for CERN to demonstrate that building core services can be done without vendor and data lock-in, that the next generation of services can be tailored to the community’s needs,” Ormancey said.

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